A key concern of researchers involved in the
creation and sharing of language resources is
to attain maximum usability, reliability and
longevity of these resources for present and
future researchers in the language sciences.
The view developed in this volume is that
spoken corpora construction and sharing are
major research endeavours that should also be
laid open to academic debate in a manner that
is more visible than is currently the case in
corpus linguistics.
The present volume brings together multiple
research perspectives to bear on the question
of what constitutes best practices for the
construction of spoken corpora. The book brings
into closer contact scholars whose
specializations have often remained in
relatively different streams of scientific
investigation; that is, scholars whose work
falls primarily in conversation analysis,
pragmatics and discourse analysis, but who are
involved in spoken corpus compilation, on the
one hand, and scholars who also specialize in
linguistics but who have been intensively
involved in developing various infrastructures
for spoken corpora, on the other hand. This
combination of scholars brings into better
relief the concerns of data providers, data
curators and data users in linguistic
research.
This book is thus unique in that it highlights
best practices from both the perspective of
assembling, annotating and linguistic analysis
of spoken corpora, as well as from the
perspective of processing, archiving and
disseminating spoken language. In doing so, the
contributions emphasise not only the
considerable promise that the rapid
technological changes that society continues to
experience in this area offer, but also
possible dangers for the unwary.